Klarna Stopped All Hiring a Year Ago To Replace Workers With AI (fortune.com) 71
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company was able to stop hiring a year ago as it invested in AI that's doing the work of hundreds of staff across the firm. From a report: The buy now, pay later finance provider has seen headcount fall 22% to 3,500 during that time, mostly due to attrition, Siemiatkowski said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York on Thursday. The company now has about 200 people using AI for their core work, he said.
Siemiatkowski said that while the total wage bill is shrinking, he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.
"People internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can," he said. "We're going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases."
Siemiatkowski said that while the total wage bill is shrinking, he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.
"People internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can," he said. "We're going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases."
So while I'm sure (Score:5, Insightful)
And the population is still growing globally. This wouldn't be a problem if we weren't a global society but we are now and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. We are probably 20 or 30 years away from the population growth stopping, maybe even 50 or 60. Meanwhile we are rapidly destroying jobs in a civilization that still has the idea that if you don't work you don't eat.
We are going to have to do something about that. We can of course keep putting our heads in the ground like an ostrich and then explaining how ostriches don't really do that over mouthfuls of dirt.
On the plus side most of the people who are going to read this comment are pretty old and who knows maybe you'll get lucky and die before the shit hits the fan. You can keep pretending the world is never going to change and suffer no consequences for the mess you leave behind. Seems to be a popular thing these days.
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We'll have to go back to subsistence farming.
Re: So while I'm sure (Score:3)
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You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
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Typical Slashdot commies. Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.
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Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
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Re: So while I'm sure (Score:1)
ice got two swallows to trade for martial arts classes here.
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I'm glad someone got this, given that we were three lines down into a Monty Python script. The new crowd here is so out of it that I got a flamebait mod from some ignorant mod that didn't recognize it
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Whooooosh. The sound you hear is the joke cow flying two hundred miles above your head.
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I doubt we're going to grant everyone a plot of arable land though. There's a much higher chance that we'll reinvent sharecropping, maybe with a trendy gig work app!
The 1% won't let you have that land (Score:2)
and after and few more Luigi Mangione's come out? (Score:2)
and after and few more Luigi Mangione's come out?
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the AI push is ridiculous. Who is going to see ads if you have AI agents browsing the web for you?
Who is going to produce content, if there is no ads paying for you (google is no longer driving traffic to websites due to the snippets showing on search results)
who is going to buy anything, if all of us are replaced by AI?
We're obviously in an AI bubble that's unsustainable long term. We'll need to see how much they can push it until an equilibrium is reached.
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Oh, don't worry, advertisers will find a way to get to your eyeballs. They always do.
It's not about that (Score:2)
It's also about making it so the ruling class doesn't depend on consumers.
What's the thing everyone always says? "Who's gonna buy their products???". You're doing it right now, right?
The 1%, and especially the 0.1% have thought long and hard about that question. They don't like you. Or me. Or any of us. and it's infuriating that they need us.
So they're going to do everything they can to make
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There is literally no amount of money the AI companies can charge to pay for the costs of the GPUs/CPUs/RAM/storage they've used. The only (short-term) winners here will be the cloud companies renting them resources... they'll have to jump onto the next fad ASAP once this bubble bursts.
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I know right! It will be like the bad old days when everybody was a farmer, until the farming machines came and took away all the farming jobs. After that, nobody could find work anywhere, and half the planet starved to death.
Wait, that didn't happen?
We've been automating things for centuries. Why should we believe that *this time* we won't find new ways to occupy ourselves?
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If it's in a post-scarcity fantasy Star Trek economy with fusion generators and nanoreplicators and FTL travel, I'm sure we can! I'm going to fly around the galaxy in my starship and fuck green-skinned Orion babes. (Just don't tell me the greenskins are actually replicants; I don't want to know.)
But if you mean economically productive ways to occupy ourselves, then anything that I do find to do, the first step will be to figur
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We have been finding ways to occupy ourselves in economically productive ways for the last several hundred years, while automation and mechanization, then computers, wiped out just about every single job description that existed in 1700. History is a better guide than speculation every time. So show me some history where people didn't adapt to automation, and I'll concede that you have a point.
The Great Cull is coming (Score:2)
"Meanwhile we are rapidly destroying jobs in a civilization that still has the idea that if you don't work you don't eat."
That will never go away. Its been that way for thousands of years and will always be that way. When you are hungry your are desperate, and those in control will ensure it stays that way.
Dystopian SCI-FI hat on. Several decades from now...
The culling of the people out of work will not initially be done by AI, rather it will be done by the elites via robot drones with assistance of AI on t
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Its been that way for thousands of years and will always be that way.
*Checks UID length.* Yep, figures.
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Computers were meant to take away all the jobs about 30-40 years ago, in reality they required more people as now we have to manage the computers and their input and output.
I can't say if AI tools will be any different to all the other computer tools, it looks at the minute that jobs have been created, but at the same time the market has changed and most of the share holders are demanding reductions of workforce, not because of AI, but just because they don't want to put money into the companies in such a v
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These trends lead to a few privileged people owning most of the valuable things on Earth, in their respective countries. A feudal system effectively.
In a feudal class system, there is no need to keep global population living standards high, there is no need for education or social mobility for people either.
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>work harder for less I'm also certain that automation has reduced workloads
How exactly does one work harder when one has less work to do?
Translation from Biz-speak (Score:4, Interesting)
"After I've skimmed as much cream as I can off the top, surviving employees will be given a small share of the wages their absent workmates would have been paid. They've bought in because they're too stupid to realize their trip to the scaffold is already being scheduled.
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"As the owner I live in a legal system that ensures I'm irreplaceable (I'm not) and that I get the lion's share of the profits and the people who do the actual work get scraps."
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Companies have constitutions to describe the ownership structure and managing directors to make decisions. The legal system has nothing to do with the choices made there.
Re: Translation from Biz-speak (Score:3)
> they're too stupid to realize their trip to the scaffold is already being scheduled.
Sadly it's not even that. People stick around in that kind of environment because it's better than them being axed. It's not like you're going to jump that ship and find one that refuses to replace people with AI. It's a matter of time and you're a fool to bail on principal when you have no alternative opportunity.
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Klowna is a stupid scam anyway. I can't see this company lasting much longer.
What happens when all these services degrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What happens when all these services degrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you've really found the thing.
Like Musk firing 3/4ths of Twitter's staff, the software, as written, already works, and doesn't need very much maintenance to keep going. It will take years of delayed development for the problems compared to the competition to start becoming glaring. Then another year or so after that before "Where did all our customers go?" gets asked.
Klarna already sells a product I'm surprised there are customers for in the first place. Splitting a single payment into several seems like a thing any payment processor company ought to be able to do.
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The technical problem with X/Twitter is that in the process of making the business run more efficiently (there's no doubt that legacy Twitter had an insane amount of overhead that needed to be cut) they've completely removed the ability for the website to scale up. The last few times Musk tried to hold town hall style audio rooms on X, the site just crashed because there's no scale up capacity anymore.
The business problem with X/Twitter is that brands have fled the site not wanting to have their brand names
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I agree that there are multiple dimensions to Twitter's ongoing collapse, but I was just trying to say that it's not instantly destructive to most tech companies to immediately fire most of your programmers. The cost of that kind of choice takes a long time to show.
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Splitting a single payment into several seems like a thing any payment processor company ought to be able to do.
I don't think splitting the payment is their value add. They've figured out a business model that allows them to effectively offer 0% interest loans without doing hard credit checks.
Or they haven't actually figured the business model, they're eating the cost of defaults, and will go bust one of these days. Wouldn't surprise me.
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The OP did post this to /., which hasn't changed almost at all for 30 years. It's pretty funny really.
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Klarna already sells a product I'm surprised there are customers for in the first place. Splitting a single payment into several seems like a thing any payment processor company ought to be able to do.
They indeed can. Which is why this sham company won't last much longer.
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Klarna already sells a product I'm surprised there are customers for in the first place. Splitting a single payment into several seems like a thing any payment processor company ought to be able to do.
Klarna is not really a payment processor. First and foremost, it is a consumer-loan bank giving micro loans to sub-prime borrowers without relying on the big credit-scoring agencies. Their business has three main challenges: (i) Having a good algo that decides whether to grant a/another BNPL (=buy now, pay later) loan; (ii) risk management and refinancing of their huge portfolio of highly risky loans; (iii) minimizing the money they lose on delinquencies and defaults through efficient collection processes
So... bad Klarna? Could have been worse. (Score:2)
Klarna Stopped All Hiring a Year Ago To Replace Workers With AI
The company name could have been Karma. :-)
The buy now, pay later finance provider ...
Isn't all financing for "buy now, pay later"?
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"Buy now, pay 30%+ interest later."
Riiiight (Score:3)
>>he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.
Riiiiight. Because productivity gains are always given back to employees and not siphoned off to owners.
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>>he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.
Riiiiight. Because productivity gains are always given back to employees and not siphoned off to owners.
He'll probably implement some percentage based bonus pool. Profits up 300% due to staff removal? Pool that profit, take a 3% cut of it, divide among remaining employees. Then he can pat himself on the back for being an altruist and a man of the people, while the rest goes directly to him and his cohorts in the C-Suite.
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>>he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.
Riiiiight. Because productivity gains are always given back to employees and not siphoned off to owners.
He'll probably implement some percentage based bonus pool. Profits up 300% due to staff removal? Pool that profit, take a 3% cut of it, divide among remaining employees. Then he can pat himself on the back for being an altruist and a man of the people, while the rest goes directly to him and his cohorts in the C-Suite.
You show me a CEO that says we'll treat our workers well, later and I'll show you a lying con man.
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Late stage capitalism, baby.
Cut most of the workforce, because AI
Sure, we'll give you more money, later.
Later, all profits go directly into CEO's pockets. Socialism for me, late stage capitalism for thee
Creativity (Score:3)
"Why hasn't anyone come up with any new ideas in this company? Useless employees....oh wait."
Attrition is irrelevant (Score:2)
Attrition just means there isn't a job opening for someone entering the job market.
Thousands of workers for a loan shark (Score:5, Insightful)
They still have thousands of workers for a basic small loan company that has been operating at a loss for years (although they may be running a profit soon).
The service they are offering is trying to make money by putting poor people in more debt. Fantastic. 20% of their staff lost 'mostly due to attrition' should be seen in the light of laying off 2000 people right before that.
And what does the AI even do? Send you veiled threats when you miss a payment?
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And what does the AI even do? Send you veiled threats when you miss a payment?
No, they figured out the ultimate threat, send Leon "Dark Maggot" Musk to your house and he doesn't leave until you pay.
Never heard of Klarna, had to google it. (Score:3)
Look at what their company does. It scrapes ecommerce sites. What's amazing to me is that updating the scrape bots was a manual process in the first place. "Move fast break things" doesn't have to always translate to "fake it till you make it"
Re: Never heard of Klarna, had to google it. (Score:1)
not even the lamest of AI hallucinations could have written the idiocy you just posted.
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Whoa, settle down there, hot shot. Klarna doesn't need you to white knight for them.
Let's see, the options are: (Score:1)
1. Excuse to layoff to downsize
2. Investment gimmick
3. Legitimate tech gamble
4. Combination of above
It could be #4. The owners may see benefits in all of them. If the bots can't eventually deliver after enough experimenting & tuning, the co. is possibly no worse off than skipping the AI angle.
It gets investors to fuel the R&D such that the owner is not eating those costs. The owner may have to sacrifice shares in the co. to get investor funds, but if the gamble pays off then growth counters the shar
really need OT pay for more jobs (Score:2)
really need OT pay for more jobs.
So they push one person to work 60-80+/hours an week to cover what used to be done by 2-3 people.
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The only thing keeping us from working 12+ hours a day for increasing debt to a company store is what was fought for and won through collective worker action. Decades of union-busting threaten to take us back there. The good news is that as it now becomes increasingly clear that companies will no longer provide anywhere near enough jobs for the number of people seeking them, people will be incentivized to take collective action again, even those who were previously willing to grin and bear it in exchange fo
Someone has to train the AI (Score:1)
So, when will the board... (Score:2)
replace the CEO with an AI? I mean, that would save millions of dollars for ROI, and what does he do that an AI can't?
Buy now, pay later = customer abuse (Score:2)
Idea for new TV show (Score:1)
Stealth layoff (Score:3)
Whenever you hear a CEO saying they are replacing people with AI, what they are really doing is laying off people, and giving t a positive spin to appease shareholders. You know, make it *sound* like they are actually increasing productivity. Real productivity gains take time, a lot longer than what Klarna is advertising.
Klarna is a horrible workplace (Score:2)
My brother just resigned from a full-stack dev position after 8 years in the company. Could not take the churn anymore.
Steer clear if you prize your sanity.
Is he really proud of this? (Score:2)
I mean, I am shocked (not really) by how thos guy thinks it's fine to brag about how he's screwing his employees up.
Does he really think no one will notice the blatant twist he is trying to push?
Their app sucks (Score:2)
200 workers 'using AI'? (Score:2)
Get excited for the chum bucket (Score:2)
It's rotting and stinks, but it's the only thing you get to survive.